Fiction

Issue No. 22

Maria Hummer

Fiction

Issue No. 22

Fiction

May 2018

Sophie Mackintosh

Fiction

May 2018

I had been sent back from the city in disgrace, back to my parents’ house in the country. It...

When I was born my mum and the nurses had laughed at my long baby fingernails ‘You were a soft ball with these sudden sharp surprises,’ my mum said, ‘like finding bits of eggshell in your omelette’ I think about this a lot I wedge my thumbnail into the omelette-y skin behind my other thumbnail I do it until red appears like tomato juice
I have always had long and fast-growing fingernails I am getting revenge on the woman who lives upstairs
*
On February 17th I meet Melanie in the foyer of our building To ‘meet’ a person can have three meanings:
To see or talk to someone for the first time
To come together with someone intentionally
To come together with someone unintentionally
When I ‘meet’ Melanie on 17 February in the foyer for me it is the third meaning
The building is supposed to be called Benson Tower but the first ‘e’ and the second ‘o’ have been gone since before I moved in It has always been Bnson Twer The building is marginally nicer on the inside that it is on the outside Melanie is standing by the fluffy green notice board but she isn’t looking at the flyers, she’s looking at her phone I close the front door behind me and walk past her I wait at the door into the stairwell She hasn’t looked up
‘Are you coming this way?’
(Now she does look up)
‘Sorry?’
‘Upstairs Are you going upstairs?’
‘Oh Yeah, sorry In a sec’
‘I can wait’
‘Do you live here too?’
It is clear that Melanie thinks we are ‘meeting’ in the first sense, even though we’ve met several times I can remember all of the times that we have met Once, we met in the doorway She approached me from behind and we stood side and side, looking at the street It was raining and I said ‘It’s raining,’ and she said ‘Cats and dogs,’ and then she laughed She pulled her scarf over her head and walked out She was wearing tan ankle boots and I wondered if they would fill up with rainwater like two novelty flowerpots
Another

Prize Entry

April 2018

Victoria Manifold

Prize Entry

April 2018

290 MILES TO GO I am on the train now. There are 290 miles to go. From the...

Growing up, the joke in my family was that I could sleep on broken glass if I had to Back then, I often slept for 11, 12, 13 hours at a time If I woke to a quiet house I would turn over and go back to sleep, no matter how long I’d been in bed for If I woke again and it was still quiet I would go downstairs to see if my father had killed my mother in the night, or the other way around
I stopped sleeping some time before my final year in school, when I was 16 or 17 I can’t remember exactly when At first I was bemused by it I would lie in bed and wait patiently for sleep to come I burned vanilla scented candles and read huge novels, The Count of Monte Cristo, Great Expectations, War and Peace, Middlemarch Nothing worked When I realised I was never going to sleep again I was furious What had I ever done? So I stopped trying I drank hot chocolate late into the night and wrote stories about girls who were dying to be saved, but in the end just died Afterwards, I ripped them into tiny pieces that my mother wouldn’t be able to read when she was going through my waste basket and searching under my bed
I’ve tried all the cures for insomnia – counting sheep, counting numbers, warm baths, hot showers, warm milky drinks, chamomile tea, sleeping pills, magnesium, going to bed at the same time every night, herbal remedies, massage, sex, drunkenness – but the only thing that really works is to stop being miserable
*
As a rule, I don’t do well at parties, but I went along with it to seem good humoured and young, or at least as young as I was pretending to be I’d been searching for somewhere to live for weeks when Kate’s ad appeared ‘If you like books and music, we’ll get along’, it said, ‘Must like cats’ I’d read hundreds of ads by then and was sure no one in Dublin wanted to live with a 37-year-old proofreader, not even the 37-year-olds In my